How to: PlanGrid and shop drawings

After the design is complete, the project is bid, and the coordination is done, it’s time to build! Contract design drawings tell you what you have to achieve; the destination. But shop drawings act as the roadmap, telling you how to get there. You need both sets, and you need them to be up-to-date and accurate. Just as communication with the design team is key to resolving questions about the design drawings, communication with your home office and detailers is key to resolving any questions about your shop drawings.

PlanGrid is the ideal tool for managing your drawings and collaborating with the entire team. Here are a few suggestions on how to use PlanGrid when it comes to shop drawings:

Tags and versions

Upload your shop drawings as part of the overall project set and tag them as shop drawings. You can toggle quickly and easily between contract drawings and shop drawings whenever you need to. Updates to your shop drawings can also be identified as versions—just custom name your versions to differentiate that the update is related to your shop drawings.

Attachments

Construction isn’t a one-trade show, but having all of the shop drawings from the different subcontractors uploaded as sheets on your PlanGrid project can very quickly run up your sheet count! When you just need to refer to other trades’ shop drawings, upload their drawings as attachments (as long as they are smaller than 11” x 17”). You’ll be able to access them, but they won’t take up as much valuable sheet count space! *

Projects

When you’re ready to share your approved shop drawings with the rest of the subcontractors, create a separate project and call it (for example) Approved Mechanical Shop Drawings. This way, you can invite specific parties to view your shop drawings and collaborate whenever a certain part of construction is taking place. When one of the subcontractors no longer needs to access your drawings (casework, for example), they can remove themselves from the project (so as to not clog their precious sheet count).

Using the options above, collaborate and communicate with the rest of your project team with the different methods that PlanGrid provides: email, publishing, snapshots, issue reports, etc.

Ultimately, the common denominator is PlanGrid: it provides the tools, but how you use those tools is only restricted by your imagination. PlanGrid is the perfect solution for managing and accessing shop drawings in the field.

Drawings uploaded as attachments will not be processed in the same way that sheets are processed — the name is the file name, there are no auto-hyperlinks, and you cannot annotate them like you can on sheets — attachments are only for viewing.

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